Options, a provider of trading infrastructure-as-a-service, has partnered Quincy Data to offer its customers trading at Equinix NY4 and the CME access to the Quincy Extreme Data ultra low latency market data service. The addition of Quincy Extreme Data to Options’ Pipe Velocity electronic trading infrastructure solution was driven by a request from an investment banking customer and is the company’s first brush with microwave and wireless data delivery.
Options’ Pipe Velocity is delivered via the company’s Private Financial Cloud platform. It includes market data, connectivity and vendor neutral application hosting and is offered as a managed service for electronic trading across major markets in North America and Europe. The Quincy Extreme Data service sources data from exchanges and delivers a normalised feed to colocation centres around the world. It is powered by McKay Brothers’ microwave network – McKay Brothers is a sister company to Quincy Data – and allows Options customers to access market data at around 4.1 milliseconds rack-to-rack, about half the speed of fibre access.
The addition of Quincy Data market data to the Options platform is one of a number of developments being made by the company to meet the needs of its 150-plus customers spanning investment banks, quantitative hedge funds and high frequency trading firms.
Ken Barnes, senior vice president at Options, describes the company’s continual quest to add more and better connectivity to the Pipe Velocity platform, as well as more colocation destinations. He says the company is well connected in the US and Europe, and will move into Asia later this year.
Talking about the company and its customers, he says: “The focus is now on return on investment, not performance at any price. This opens up the market for us as we can deliver that balance. We know that to succeed in this business, we have to be very flexible.”
